Description
Book SynopsisIn Europe and North America Muslims are often represented in conflict with modernitybut what could be more modern than motivational programs that represent Islamic practice as conducive to business success and personal growth? Daromir Rudnyckyj''s innovative and surprising book challenges widespread assumptions about contemporary Islam by showing how moderate Muslims in Southeast Asia are reinterpreting Islam not to reject modernity but to create a spiritual economy consisting of practices conducive to globalization.
Drawing on more than two years of research in Indonesia, most of which took place at state-owned Krakatau Steel, Rudnyckyj shows how self-styled spiritual reformers seek to enhance the Islamic piety of workers across Southeast Asia and beyond. Deploying vivid description and a keen ethnographic sensibility, Rudnyckyj depicts a program called Emotional and Spiritual Quotient (ESQ) training that reconfigures Islamic practice and history to make the religion compatib
Trade Review
"In anthropology, the value of inspiring ideas in any period depends on their realization in convincing ethnographic achievements. In this regard, Spiritual Economies is a bravura performance: at the site of Krakatau Steel, it shows the power and kinship of experiments in neoliberal economy, religious revival, ethnography—and para-ethnography—all in the same frame."—George E. Marcus, author of Ethnography Through Thick and Thin
"In the clearly written and strongly argued Spiritual Economies, Daromir Rudnyckyj brings together the anthropology of development and globalization and the anthropology of the rising Islamic piety movement to show that religious resurgence can be part of globalizing economic development, not necessarily a refuge from it. He traces many of Indonesia's recent political and religious transformations from the vantage point of a steel factory, where the ESQ spiritual training program combines spiritual guidance, business success training, and a vision of Islam as predictive and encompassing of science and technology."—John Bowen, Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis, and author of Can Islam Be French?
Table of Contents
Introduction: Spiritual Reform and the Afterlife of DevelopmentPart I. Milieu
1. Faith in Development
2. Developing FaithPart II. Intervention
3. Spiritual Economies
4. Governing through AffectPart III. Effects
5. Post-Pancasila Citizenship
6. Spiritual Politics and Calculative ReasonConclusion: Life Not Calculated?References
Index
